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TREASURY DEPARTMENT 
Bureau of Publicity : War Loan Organization 



The War 
The Farm 

, and . . . 

The Farmer 



By 
HERBERT QUICK 

MEMBER FEDERAL FARM LOAN BOARD 




/P -Z^^ 7/ 



WASHINGTON 
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 

1918 



B7 ©f B. 

FEB 15 1919 



.^8 



THE WAK, THE FARM, AND THE FARMER. 

By HERBERT QUICK. 

The farmer everywhere loves peace. The American farmer espe- 
cially loves peace. Since the dawn of history, the farmer has been 
the m_an who suffered most from war. All that he possesses lies out 
of doors in plain sight, and is spoil of war — his house, his grain, his 
live stock. He knows that he pays the price of war " in steer and 
g'ear and stack," and that the flames that light the skies in the rear 
of every invading army are consuming the things that yesterday 
represented his life work, and the life labors of past generations of 
farmers — the little coral islands of comfort and wealth that decades 
of toil on the farm builds up. 

But the farmer everywhere is a Avarrior when war is the only 
thing which will make a.nd keep him free — either a warrior or a 
serf. He can not rally to the colors as quickly as can the dwellers 
in the cities, because it takes longer to send to the farms than to the 
cities the fiery cross of the call to arms. It takes longer to call the 
farmers from the fields than the city dwellers from the shops; for 
many do not hear the first blast of the trumpet, and others do not 
at first understand its meaning because they have not had the time 
to talk the matter over with their acquaintances on the street cor- 
ners, in the stores, on the cars, in the clubs, and at other gatherings, 
and instead of reading half a dozen extras a day, the farmer may 
read weekly papers only instead of dailies, and must have more 
time in a sudden emergency to make up his mind. 

The work of the fields, the care of the live stock, and the mud and 
slush of the long road to town are all obstacles to that sudden rush 
of news which sometimes carries the cities away in mad outbursts 
of excitement. 

It is impossible to set the farmers of the United States on fire by 
means of a.ny sudden spark of rumor or to blow a chance catch of 
flame among them into a conflagration with any hand bellows of 
artificial agitation; but when the farmers do ignite they burn with 
a slow, hot fire, whicli nothing can put out. They are sometimes the 
last to heat up, but they stay hot, and in a long fight they are always 
found sturdily carrying the battle across No Man's Land to the foe 
in the last grim struggle. They fight the slow rear-guai-d action 
that covers retreat in disaster, and their stubborn valor always helps 
to turn the tide toward victory in the final triumph. The American 
farmer will give all that he lias and all that he is to win this great 
war against war, this enormous struggle to win again the victory 
which we fondlv believed we had twice won in the past. 

3 

41222°— 18 



4 THE WAR, THE FARM, AND THE FARMER. 

This war was at first hard to understand. No armed foe invaded 
the United States. The night skies were not reddened by the burn- 
ing byres and farmsteads of America. No raiding parties harried 
us of our cattle or horses. No saber rattlers insulted our women. It 
seemed to many of us that we were not at war, the thing was so far 
off, and it came to us in so unfamiliar a guise. We did not then 
realize what a giant war has become. We did not then know that 
a monster has arisen with a thousand arms, who could reach across 
the seas and could take from us three-fourths of everything we 
grew without our being aware of it and could follow up his robbery 
with invasion, subjugation, and national death. We did not at first 
realize this, but finally we saw that it was so. 

If the Imperial German Government had made and enforced an 
order that no American farmer should leave his own land, that he 
could not haul a load of grain or drive a head of stock to town — if, 
in fact, the Kaiser had laid an interdict on all intercourse between 
farm and farm and between farm and town, he would have done 
only a little more than he accomplished by his interdict against 
American farmers' use of the sea. What was the order against 
which we rebelled when we went into this war? Look at the con- 
dition of the American farmer in the latter part of 1914 and the 
first half of 1915 and see. 

When the war broke out, through terror and surprise and panic 
we gave up for a while the use of the sea as a highway. To a great 
extent we gave it up. And so long as we gave it up we, the farmers 
of America, were ruined. I know an Iowa farmer who sold his 1914 
crop of 25,000 bushels of wheat for 70 cents a bushel. Farmers in the 
South sold their cotton for half the cost of producing it. All this 
time those portions of the world whose ports were open were ready to 
pay almost any price for our products; and when we finally rallied 
and set once more in motion the ships of the world prosperity re- 
turned to the fai-ms of America. But prosperity never returned to 
the farmers of those nations which remained cut oif from the seas. 

Take the case of Australia, for instance. There three crops h;i/e 
rem.ained unsold on the farms. There were no ships which could be 
spared to make the long voyage to Australia ; and so, in spite of the 
efforts of the Government to save the farmers from ruin, grain has 
rotted in the open because there was no place in which to store it, and 
millions of tons have been spoiled by mice and other rodents. 

Such conditions spell irretrievable disaster, in spite of all any Gov- 
ernment can do. Such conditions would have prevailed in this coun- 
try, from the outbreak of the war until now, gradually growing 
worse and worse, and deepening in disaster from hard times to 
universal stagnation and widespread famine, if our Government had 
not first resisted with every diplomatic weapon the encroachments of 
the German Government, and finally, when its cruel, piratical, and 
ruthless policy moved on from illegal restrictions to open and ruth- 
less murder, if our Government had not drawn the sword. 

Why did we draw the sword ? Was it to keep up the price of wheat 
and cotton, and to protect trade only? If someone should order you 
to remain on your farm, and not to use the public highway, would 
your resistance be based only on the fear of loss in propei-ty, the 
profits from failure to market your crops, the inconvenience in not 



THE WAE, THE FARM, AND THE FAEMER. 5 

being able to buy your supplies in town ? By no means. You would 
fight to the last gasp, not to make money, but to be free. 

When a man is enslaved, all he loses in money is his wages; but 
the white man has never been able to accept slavery for that reason. 
The v/hite man has never yet been successfully enslaved. There rises 
up in him against servitude a resentment so terrible at the loss of his 
ownership of himself that death has alwaj^s been preferable to 
slavery. 

What the Imperial German Government offered the farmers of 
America in its ruthless submarine warfare was not the loss of profits, 
but slavery to the saber rattler of Potsdam. He purposed to make us 
slaves by murdering the people who take our products to market. By 
all the laws of civilized warfare commerce under a neutral flag was 
free from any hindrance except the legal interferences justified by 
war; but the Germans not only stopped merchant vessels, but sunk 
them. They not only sunk them, but they sunk them without warn- 
ing. They not only sunk them without warning, but they sunk them 
without trace — the most devilish thing war has seen since the savages 
scalped our ancestors and threw screaming babies into the flames of 
burning cabins; for the German plan or sinking merchant vessels 
without trace is based on the murderer's maxim that dead men tell no 
tales ; and it was executed by the massacre of men, women, and chil- 
dren, who, having committed themselves to the awful dangers of 
small boats in the open sea after their ships were torpedoed were 
then mercilessly raked with gun fire, and exterminated to the last 
poor unprotected, unpitied wretch ! 

These are the murders that stain the hands of the Kaiser and his 
advisers and minions. These outrages were perpetrated on neutral 
vessels ; when all that civilized warfare gave the Germans a right to 
do even with the merchant vessel under a hostile flag, was to stop it 
at sea and under proper circumstances make i; a prize of war ; but to 
kill the civilians on board, even under a hostile flag, was nothing but 
stark, plain, unmitigated murder. 

And these murders were committed in order that we might be 
enslaved ! Having the right, according to the laws of war, to take the 
sea with his fleet, and fight the thing out, gun to gun, but being 
afraid to do so for fear tliat he might lose his fleet, being afraid or 
unable to stop the selling of our products to his enemies or to open 
his own ports to us by fair means, he declared that he would do it by 
the foulest methods ever resorted to in war. He declared the sea 
closed ; and that he would keep it closed not by war, but by murder. 

To have submitted would have cost us dear in prosperity ; but that 
would have been the least of our loss. 

We should have had to grovel before the German Government. 

We should have had to accept murder as a thing against which 
we could not defend ourselves. 

We should have allowed this new horror to become a part of all 
future wars, and have been responsible for its incorporation into 
international law. 

We should have proved that because the fire which burns up our 
farms' usefulness is beyond the horizon, we will submit to the kind- 
ling of it. 



6 THE WAR, THE FARM, AND THE FARMER. 

We might have accepted the 70 cents or less for wheat, the 6 cents 
for cotton, and the like in case of misfortune, but we could not do it 
merely because we were commanded to do it. 

By so doing we shoidd have accepted degradation. We should 
have accepted at the behest of a half-crazed autocrat in Europe a 
lower standard of living in America. We should have given up at 
his command the hope for our children's education, the payment of 
the mortgage, the better school, the new church, that whole scheme 
of better rural life which is based on freedom to produce and free- 
dom to market what we produce. We should have begun, after win- 
ning our freedom in our own revolution, after establishing a union 
on the foundation of liberty in the blood and tears of our war be- 
tween the States, after wresting these States from the wilderness, 
after gaining religious freedom, and freedom of speech and of the 
press — after all these victories won by a people gathered from every 
nation of Europe in the name of freedom, we should have begun to 
knuckle under to autocracy. We should have basely yielded up our 
birthright as Americans. 

Such a thought is intolerable, when we come to understand it. 
Peace at such a price would not be peace, but only a preparation for 
a future revolt against subjugation. Better any sort of war, better 
war forever than that. Let us remember little Holland, which fought 
the great empire of Spain for 80 years and finally won her liberty. 

This, then, is the war in which we are fighting. Whenever the tima 
comes for new sacrifices, let us remember that we fight for liberty. 
Not only for the liberty of the Belgians, the French, the Serbs, 
the Russians, the British, the Montenegrins, the Rumanians, the 
Italians, but of all nations, even for the German people themselves, 
and most of all for our own liberties. Not for our own liberties 
to-morrow, or next year, or 20 years from now, but for our freedom 
to-day. Not for the right to live in the future, but for the right to 
make a living this year. 

German oppression had begun to pinch us before we entered the 
war. If we had not declared war, but had accepted the conditions of 
life ordered for us by the Kaiser, we should to-day be a poverty- 
stricken people, our factories shut down, our workmen unemployed, 
our people starving, our farmers ruined by the poverty of those for 
whose consumption we grew our crops. There is loss and sacrifice 
in the war; but there would have been far more of loss and sacrifice 
in accepting the German terms. We should have lost more in money 
than we have spent in the war, but we should have lost something- 
far more precious. We should have lost our souls. 

The farmers of this country could carry the war to a victorious 
conclusion even if all the rest of the Nation should quit. The rest 
will not quit; but we could win it without them if we had to do it. 

The farmers of the United States can whip Germany. 

We can whip them with guns. 

We can whip them with our products. 

We can whip them with our money. 

Every farmer in the United States must remember that the war has 
a first mortgage on every cent he has. The last spare cent in the 
pockets of ever}^ farmer in America should be devoted to the war. 



THE WAR, THE FARM, AND THE FARMER. 7 

The Kaiser began foreclosing his mortgage on our farms when he 
declared ruthless submarine warfare, and the war is our answer to 
his bill of foreclosure. 

Our contribution is, first our sons and brothers for the trenches; 
second, the last pound of food products which we can grow by mobi- 
lizing our scanty labor supply, utilizing the men, women, children, 
and townspeople about us; and third, money for Liberty bonds. 

This is the crucial year of the war. Our soldiers are at the front, 
hundreds of thousands of them in the trenches, and 1,000,000 more 
ready to go. The whole burden of carrying on our own part in the" 
war and of aiding our sister nations in arms rests on tlie United 
States Treasury. 

If the Treasury fails or falters or finds itself unable to respond to 
every call upon it, the war is lost. Do you realize that? 

Your son and all the Nation's sons are relying on the United States 
Treasury to furnish things with which they may fight. 

Their lives are lost if the Treasury fails. Our country is lost if the 
Treasury fails. 

Germany wins if the Treasury fails. 

Therefore every cent you can rake and scrape together belongs to 
the Treasury that our soldiers may come back to us alive and vic- 
torious. This is literally true. We can whip the Germans with our 
money ; but not with the money in our pockets or bank accounts. It 
must go into the United States Treasury in subscriptions to Liberty 
bonds. 

While Gerard was our ambassador in Berlin the Kaiser said to him 
one day that he would stand no nonsense from America after the 
war. 

Do you know what that means ? It means that the Germans intend 
to subjugate this country if they come out of this war victorious. 

The German Imperial Government has preached the superiority of 
Germany to all the rest of the world until the German nation is 
drunk with megalomania. One of their great writers expressed the" 
prevailing, official view in 1903, when he wrote: 

The Teutonic race is called upon to circle the earth with its rule, to exploit 
the treasures of nature and of human power, and to make the passive races 
servient elements in its cultural development. * * * Whoever has the 
characteristics of the Teutonic race Is superior. All the dark peoples are 
mentally inferior, because they belong to the passive races. The cultural value 
of a nation is measured by the quantity of Teutonism it contains. 

Are you one of the darker races? 

Are you willing to be rated as one of the " servient elements " in 
Germany's cultural development? 

Yon began to be one of the servient elements when peaceful people 
were slaughtered as they carried your produce to market. Was it 
because ypu belonged to a " passive race '' ? 

This war is for the purpose of saying to that insane claim, with 
the roar of a hundred thousand cannon, " No ! " 

In von Tannenberg's book " Grossdeutscheland," he says — and in 
saying it he voiced the orthodox official view — " It is Germany's task 
to-day to pass from the position of a European power to that of a 
world power. * * * A policy of sentiment is folly. Enthusiasm 
for humanity is idiocy. Right and wrong are notions needed in civil 



021 394 578 6 



8 THE WAR, THE FARM, AND THE FARMER. 

life only. The German people is always right because it is the Ger 
man people and because it numbers 67,000,000." 

If the people of the United States should ever go insane enough to I 
think such things of itself, it would be the duty of the rest of the] 
world to crush the United States the moment it drew its sword and 
started out to establish itself on that superman basis. It would be 
its duty to crush us, not only for the sake of the world, but for our ' 
own sakes. Until this thing is crushed out of Germany all other 
nations will be looked upon by Junkerdom as they now look upon 
us, as " servient elements " in the development of German kultur, as 
" passive races," while they are the active ones, as " mentally in- 
ferior," as peoples in dealing with whom Germany will never be so 
foolish as to be guided by those notions of right ancl wrong which are 
needed in " civil life only." 

Never since the Turks threatened to overwhelm Europe, perhaps 
not even then, was the world in such danger as now. Germany is 
not yet defeated. We must defeat her this year. Unless we win, 
our place in the world is lost and our history as one of the " servient 
nations" begins. We must withhold nothing from the support of 
the war. We must give our sons. We must bring forth food in 
abundance, multiplying our labor t*o that end. We must give into 
the Treasury of the United States every cent we can spare. 

This summer the support of the war is up to the farmers; and 
Uncle Sam has never called upon the farmers in vain ! 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS A 

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021 394 578 6 



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